Strategic measurements — how and where these can help in the Life Sciences industrial strategy

In this article, Michael Adeogun, head of Life Sciences and Health at NPL examines how and where measurement can help government and industry grasp the opportunities the Strategy and Sector Deal offer.

strategic measurements

Good measurement is vital to achieving the aim of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy — to advance UK R&D to benefit the economy and society. As the UK’s National Measurement Institute, NPL helps to deliver the National Measurement System (NMS) to provide the framework, facilities and expertise to enable measurements to be reproduced with confidence, and with quantified uncertainty in the UK.

Many of the issues raised by the strategy, such as the need to accelerate access, foster growth of UK industry and ensure effective use of data, are priority areas for the NMS too. The NMS is also responding to the grand challenges identified in the Industrial Strategy white paper1 of supporting health ageing and leveraging the UK’s health data to improve health outcomes and UK leadership in life sciences.

Accelerating access

A key theme of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, which builds on the government’s Accelerated Access Review, is increased collaboration between the NHS and industry, to accelerate the adoption of new treatments.

Working in closer partnership is critical to drug attrition and ‘failing fast’ — to the benefit of industry and the patients. It takes the pharmaceutical industry 10-15 years and more than $1 billion to develop a drug to clinical trial stage,2 Phase II clinical programmes have the lowest success rate of the four development phases, with only ~30% of developmental candidates advancing to Phase III. With an improved measurement infrastructure in place, many drugs that go on to fail could be eliminated much earlier in the development process.

After receiving funding through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund NPL has strengthened its UK high-resolution mass spectrometry imaging facility to improve drug development and our understanding of disease states, which can be easily accessed by UK industry. The facility is supporting drug development through providing an understanding of where unlabelled drugs go in tissues and the changes induced by these treatments as well as better characterising disease tissue.

The strategy also recognises the increasing role of physical sciences in the sector, and the value of interdisciplinary activity. An example of this can be seen in a current project NPL is working on, being funded by Cancer Research UK, which is aiming to revolutionise the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer by creating a reproducible, standardised way to understand different tumours in greater detail. The team involved is multi-disciplinary, from a range of partner institutions, bringing new skills and approaches to an established problem.

Another aspect is reproducibility of research, which is vital in achieving scientific consensus earlier to help speed the uptake of discoveries. Standards provide certainty in the consistency of the product performance, which is crucial when deciding on the products that are to be commercialised by industry. Working with SynbiCITE at Imperial College London and in collaboration with LGC and NIBSC, NPL is establishing a new £7 million virtual lab to help the UK synthetic biology industry improve the manufacturing and adoption of new products through standardisation.

Fostering growth

Michael Adeogun, head of Life Sciences and Health at NPL

Michael Adeogun

The need to nurture start-ups and encourage growth was also encouraged by the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, as was the expansion of manufacturing in the sector. As part of the strategy, the government announced £146 million to help fund new manufacturing centres for vaccines, cell and gene therapy and medicines manufacturing, in addition to announcing increasing R&D investment, to 2.4% of GDP, to ease co-operation between academia and industry in this area.

Funding through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is being used by NPL to establish the UK measurement infrastructure for medical imaging technologies, to deliver new testing capabilities supporting the development, translation and adoption of these imaging technologies. The project will ensure acceleration of the development and adoption of the latest measurement techniques and best practices. Additionally, NPL is working to identify and engage with medical imaging companies to improve competitiveness, support the access to new markets, and help deliver higher revenues and job creation.

NPL is also working to discover, screen and validate new classes of antimicrobials with Ingenza, a world leader in the application of industrial biotechnology and synthetic biology, and the University of Plymouth, through an Innovate UK grant, to tackle antimicrobial resistance, a problem that could cause up to 10 million deaths each year by 2050.3 The project will use a class of antimicrobials, called epidermicins, which naturally target superbugs like MRSA, to enhance the range of bacteria they can kill as well as the potency at which they can do this. The project will also look to scale up production of these antimicrobials for further testing and clinical trials, helping to accelerate their development.

Data and digital health

Finally, the strategy outlines the need to make the best use of data and digital tools to support research and better patient care. This is also highlighted in the recently published Industrial Strategy white paper and the Life Sciences Sector Deal. The UK is unique in having a long-running national health service. With this comes long-term data sets, which can be helpful in finding trends, co-morbidities and effectiveness of treatments to improve healthcare.

To realise this opportunity both industry and biomedical researchers need high quality data and longitudinal samples at scale, with long-term follow up, and scope to explore multiple technologies. This also requires standardisation and regulation to be embedded to ensure different systems can be correlated and combined such as radiology and pathology systems. Through high quality, validated and standardised data, AI and machine learning tools can be developed. NPL is also exploring how metadata around data quality might be stored at a machine-readable level, to make this information more accessible and is developing data standards to ensure the integrity of data, accelerate its use in critical applications and ease the integration of non-medical datasets, such as those from wearables, into a clinical setting.

The vision

The vision of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and the process initiated through the Life Sciences Sector deals is to make the UK a world leader in this sector — and this should only be welcomed. To get there, progress is required across the research, technology, manufacturing and regulatory landscapes, and measurement is critical to achieving this. We look forward to working with partners in industry, academia and government to realising this vision.